BludgerTrack: 51.0-49.0 to Labor

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A big week of polling, with Newspoll, Morgan and ReachTEL joining the usual weekly Essential Research, has added to the drift back to the Coalition on the BludgerTrack poll aggregate. The aggregate concurs with the headline figures of Newspoll and ReachTEL in having the Labor two-party lead at 51.0-49.0, which sees Labor’s seat projection dip below absolute majority status for the first time since the beginning of May. Labor is down one seat on last week in New South Wales, and two in Queensland. Newspoll provides new figures on the leadership ratings, which sadly have less to go on now the monthly Nielsen is removed from the equation. The Newspoll numbers were good for Bill Shorten, which is reflected in the trendline, whereas Tony Abbott’s recovery has tapered off. However, Abbott still has his nose in front as preferred prime minister.

[Christopher Pyne is grumpy and irritable. The born to rule Tory is having a tantrum now that the senate will not let him deregulate the universities – something the Abbott government never got a mandate for. He claims students should “get some perspective” as the government is not “asking for their left kidney.”

Well, here’s some perspective.

If Pyne went to university under his deregulated system, he would be paying off HECS debts until the age of 64. This is not to mention how much harder a life would be to save for that ever more unaffordable house deposit and then somehow pay off that mortgage. And that’s before considering having children and the ballooning costs associated with raising them. What the minister is effectively asking those about to enter university is to indenture themselves into a life of debt. To rub salt in the wound, Pyne and Abbott never paid a cent for their degrees upfront.]

[Radio announcer Alan Jones was truly bewildered while interviewing Christopher Pyne on Wednesday, astounded that despite the education minister’s “brilliant” advocacy skills the “blockheads” running state governments could not understand that the allegation of an $80bn cut was totally wrong. In fact, Jones said, “there hasn’t been a more monstrous lie perpetrated since Julia Gillard said there’d be no carbon tax”.

Pyne somehow neglected to refer Jones to page 7 of the government’s glossy budget overview which clearly states that the government is changing indexation of state grants and “removing funding guarantees for public hospitals. These measures will achieve cumulative savings of over $80bn by 20024-25.”

Nor did Pyne take issue when Jones suggested that the police should respond to the student protesters gathering around the country on Wednesday by “carting these thugs away and locking them up”. Indeed Pyne claims the students are “intent on shutting down democracy in Australia”.

Of course protests should be peaceful. But rather than attacking all its critics – the opposition, the states, the students – the government might do better just trying to explain its budget and the choices it has made.]

BTW I must compliment the makers of the new ABC documentary on infrastructure planning in Australia “Utopia”. Very accurate and well researched, especially last night’s episode on the Very Futile Train. I just wish they had not changed all the names, so we could see which Ministers are being referred to?

I hope future episode’s deal with Melbourne’s Very Big Tunnel, and Australia’s Not Built Network.

shorten is dull as dishwater … his rhetoric is limp and tepid – labor is a national party and have a duty to get best leaders – not just satisfy internal power needs – whatever were they thinking when they gave shorten the nod over someone like albanese?

Christopher Pyne is ‘excited’ about his reforms. So excited he said nothing about them prior to the 2013 election.

There’s nothing to negotiate except to postpone the commencement date by 2 years to give him time to share his excitement. That will and give hime time to convince the electorate in the leadup to the next election.

Sarcasm aside, the Utopia episode last night really was quite accurate. A VFT in Australia is not viable in an age of affordable oil. Doing a good interstate rail freight network to get all the long distance trucks off major rural highways would be a far better use of half the money. It would also save more greenhouse gases and better support regional towns.

So if we want to employ rail workers, lets complete urban passenger rail and rural freight lines, not waste money on something that is far more expensive, and would have capacity to move far more people than actually travel between any two of our capital cities.

To put it in perspective, a modern VFT line can move the equivalent of a jumbo jet full of people every six minutes between two cities. We do not have anything close to that number of people even travelling between Sydney and Melbourne. Sorry, it is nonsense. I’m sure it was a nice tie. I have a Brisbane Lions one that is a personal favourite. That does not mean they will win the flag this year.

But the worst excuse ever was that he couldn’t fit the dinner into his schedule because he was already committed on that date, when the Senators’ dinner is apparently a standard event. (Pet writhes in agony in her attempts to rewrite history.)

[ A VFT in Australia is not viable in an age of affordable oil. Doing a good interstate rail freight network to get all the long distance trucks off major rural highways would be a far better use of half the money.]

I play a small part (regrettably – I should have never promised to do this) in getting the UK HS2 to go.

Only a couple of hours ago I said somewhere else “it’s not about passengers and badgers, it’s about freight”.

the higher education reforms are not going down well for the families whose children are attending university open days.
I am surprised that this issue is not front and centre of the political debate. It is going to dramatically change the social landscape of this country

Talking of rewriting history, Brandis is going the 10 degrees of difficulty with twist and pike.

He has given a speech crying out for religious freedom, arguing that it is the Catholic Church that has fought for individual freedom for 2000 years, and that the secular lobby are just jumping on the bandwagon and attacking the Church “with prejudice”. (Hidden agenda: defend the paedophile priests?)

On Radio National early this morning I heard David Marr refute this theory with knobs on. Beautiful to hear. There may be a transcript, don’t know.

[Abbott did more to undermine his own budget with a few words than the crossbenchers and Labor have managed in months.

To be fair, most of the damage to the selling of the budget has been caused by the government, and this was as bad, if not worse, than the Treasurer’s remarks about carless poor people.]

I love the ‘to be fair’ there – let’s not give Labor or anyone else credit, the government f*cked it up all by themselves.

(All Labor had to do was not get in the way…)

[Backbenchers thought Macdonald was a silly old bugger and fellow Queenslander Ewen Jones took him to task.]

And, as Macdonald has pointed out, no one outside the party room should know this.

The culture this hints at (if you criticise the PM, it will be leaked) has the potential to damage the Liberals further.

If MPs do not feel that they can speak freely in the party room, ideally then they do not speak out at all. Which means the government will become further out of touch with what’s happening on the ground.

Not living in an ideal world where every MP is a well regulated automaton, what will happen is that MPs vent elsewhere – and that’s most likely to be in the media.

So those leaking against Macdonald are (potentially) damaging the party more in the long run than they are Macdonald (who has very little to lose…)

[Abbott said he was late because he had to attend a fundraiser in Melbourne on Monday night, then added that for “entitlement reasons” he needed to have an event in the morning, and that was what made him late.]

Despite Turnbull’s convenient hearing loss, it’s good to see that this is now established in the media as an absolute fact.

[..was that the government was in a good position and had probably done as well as the Howard government had in its first year (which, by the way, was shattered by travel rorts).]

Ah. So we can expect the Libs to lose on the 2PP at the next election, at the very least, if this is their standard.

[Strictly speaking, what happened with Abbott was not dysfunction. It was a moment of madness brought on by poor planning, extreme tiredness and provocation.]

Has any intrepid investigative journalist, spurred on by the brave actions of their colleagues in places like Syria, managed to find out what this fundraiser was? I mean, I would imagine that it would take all of twenty minutes max to find out. (Ah, sorry — clearly too much effort…)